The SEI helps advance software engineering principles and practices and serves as a national resource in software engineering, computer security, and process improvement. The SEI works closely with defense and government organizations, industry, and academia to continually improve software-intensive systems. Its core purpose is to help organizations improve their software engineering capabilities and develop or acquire the right software, defect free, within budget and on time, every time.

Abstract

Throughout the third quarter of 2013, researchers in the CERT® Insider Threat Center, part of the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute, contacted commercial and government cloud service providers (CSPs) to better understand the administrative and technical risks posed by CSP insiders and the countermeasures that CSPs are considering and deploying to identify and mitigate insider attacks. Based on the insight obtained from participating CSPs, CERT researchers have examined how existing CSP insider threat management practices may be improved. Researchers also examined the CERT Division's Insider Threat Assessment workbooks to identify some data types useful for CSP security information and event management (SIEM) systems, specifically for mitigating insider threats. A table listing those identified data sources may be of use for CSPs adding logging, analysis, and alerts to their SIEM systems. This report contains observations obtained from interview and survey responses of participating CSP personnel, considerations for improving insider threat mitigation processes, and current challenges within the CSP community as observed by the Insider Threat Center team.